`The world is a complex, continuous experience, but in language and thought, we simplify this stream into events, and we categorize them by similarities, such as their participants. Where do these categorizations come from?
In this presentation, I will introduce a project centered around thematic roles from a psychological perspective. I will present a study designed to explore whether the salience that certain thematic roles exhibit in language aligns with a psychological or perceptual saliency of such roles. I will discuss the...
Yağmur Sağ and Tanya Bondarenko & Patrick Elliott will present their NELS talks.
Yağmur's talk:
Fake Mass Nouns and Associative Plurality
A significant debate surrounds the count vs. mass distinction, with theories seeking to capture variation while maintaining a universal logical basis (Link 1983; Rothstein 2010; Schwarzschild 2011; Grimm 2012, a.o.). One aspect of variation involves “fake mass nouns”, which are ontologically count but mimic mass nouns by resisting pluralization and direct combination with numerals. This study...
Title of Anastasia's talk: How does negation interact with the iconic use of space?
Abstract: In this talk we will ask how negation, and negative meanings more in general, interact with iconic co-speech gestures. We will focus on depictive (Davidson, 2023) as well as diagrammatic-like iconicity (Tsilia and Davidson, forthcoming), while we will also compare the behaviour of iconic co-speech gestures with that of iconic loci in ASL. Theories differ in their predictions with Ebert and Ebert (2014) predicting iconic co-speech gestures to be...
Abstract: Through possession and existential sentences in Japanese Sign Language(JSL) Sign languages have been shown to express existential and possessive sentences in related ways that also connect to expressions of location, just like spoken languages, based on data from American Sign Language (ASL), Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS) and Croatian Sign Language (HZJ) (Chen Pichler et al. 2008), which raises the question about similarities and differences across sign...
Theme maximalization encoded by verbal classifiers: bian in Mandarin Chinese
Maximalization strategies and their syntactic representations are at the centre of a long debate (Filip and Rothstein 2006; Filip 2008; Martínez Vera 2021; a.o.). Semantically, events can be...
This collaborative project with Yagmur Sag, Kate Davidson, and Jian Cui investigates an unexpected contrast between demonstrative descriptions and definite descriptions on their anaphoric uses. If two (or more) discourse referents are introduced in the preceding sentence, it is perfectly natural to refer to one of them in the following sentence using a definite description. Use of demonstrative descriptions in the same context, however, is degraded, with existing accounts of anaphoric demonstratives and definites providing no explanation for this contrast. Saha, Sag, and Davidson (2023)...
Late exposure to the first language has effects on linguistic and cognitive skills. In this study, we investigate the comprehension of zero-anaphora in native and late Deaf adult Turkish Sign Language signers to understand their reference-tracking strategies in the absence of morphological cues and see if there are differences between these groups. The results of the task conducted with 32 participants (16 native adult signers – 16 late-...
Title: Contrastive inference in English, ASL, and Mandarin
Kate will present some fresh results of an experimental pragmatics project led by last spring's co-op student Chloe Frey (who may be able to join us!) on contrastive inferences for adjectives in both English (with co-speech gesture) and ASL (including classifiers). English results are a replication of earlier contrastive inference work in gesture; extending the question to modifiers in ASL, we find that adjectival modifiers based on classifiers pattern like English adjectives and not English gesture. We... Read more about Kate Davidson and Chloe Frey present
Research on imperative constructions has revealed that imperatives in many languages exhibit common properties, such as subject omission, resistance to combine with negation and non-embeddability (among others) (cf. Han 2001; Aikhenvald 2010). From a semantic/pragmatic perspective, imperatives are an interesting case regarding the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics, since a sentence like Go home! can convey a variety of meanings (imperative speech acts) such as commands, permissions, advice, etc. (cf. Portner 2007, Kaufmann 2011;... Read more about Marianthi Koraka presents